Distributed computing is a form of computing in which the processing nodes, or computers, are physically distributed. These computers (clients and servers) are interconnected, and must cooperate in order to maintain some shared state. A distributed computer system can be characterized as a heterogeneous set of hardware, software, and data components; the size and geographical extent of which can vary over a large range. The components are connected by a network and provide a uniform set of services (such as naming, and remote invocation, for example) with certain global properties (such as names, access, and security management, for example).
Distributed objects provide a useful mechanism for client-server communication. The architectures defined for distributed object systems are software frameworks which are required for building and using client/server applications that use distributed objects. Distributed objects are independent pieces of code that can be accessed by local or remote clients via method invocations. Clients can access distributed objects without knowing where the objects reside or what operating system the objects are executed on. The distributed object framework also provides an infrastructure for supporting a large number of services and applications that can spawn any number of transactions. CORBA and JAVA Components (JAVA RMI and JAVA IDL) are two widely used distributed object architectures.